Saturday, July 18, 2009

What is GEO targeting? How it will help my website? How to do it?

The goal behind every website is to increase traffic. It is vital part of targeting your website for the specific visitors who view your website. For example if you are market only covers UK then your content should include this word, so people come to know that your business is mainly focused on UK market.

GEO targeting is the method of online marketing of a website according to the geographical location of visitors of your website. Geo targeting help you to improve the profit and also help users to find more specific results they are looking for.

IP based geo targeting will help you redirect your visitors to the country specific website. For example like Google, if you open google.com from UK it will redirect you to www.google.co.uk this call IP based geo targeting. In PHP a simple script is available which recognized the country by IP address and redirect them.

How it will help in SEO and how to do it?

Geo targeting is also a crucial part in optimization process for your website. Search engines are become advance and change their algorithm regularly to provide up to date information to their searchers. Geo targeting your website for a specific county help search engine to determine your targeted country specific users and accordingly that they improve your ranking in their results.

Search engine first try to find where the website is hosted. If your target market is German or France or Canada and your hosting server located somewhere in USA then it will not help you to optimize your website for country specific search engines. So try to find a web hosting provider whose server is located in your region.

Top level domain or TLD of domain name is also play an important role. If your target customer base is France then try to search for a domain name with country specific TLD like www.yourdomain.fr

Google webmaster tool is another useful way to let Google know which your targeted audience is. You need to create an account in Google Webmaster Tool and then specify your targeted country through drop down box.

Content is the king in optimizing a website. You should also include the country name in your content to let search engine know about your targeted audience.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.